Cherokee rose
by QWERTYsweetheart
Summary: Carol tells Tyreese about hope, Sophia and the Cherokee rose she carries in her pocket. Set after the mid-season break.


Disclaimer: I do not own nor claim to own The Walking Dead or any characters and places associated with Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard's story or Frank Darabont's adaptation. No profit is made from the writing for this fanfiction!

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"_It's a Cherokee Rose. The story is that when American soldiers were moving Indians off their land on the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee mothers were grieving and crying so much 'cause they were losing their little ones along the way from exposure and disease and starvation. A lot of them just disappeared. So the elders, they said a prayer; asked for a sign to uplift the mothers' spirits, give them strength and hope. The next day this rose started to grow where the mothers' tears fell."_

Carol opened her eyes to the starry sky. She didn't know what had waked her, feeling as at ease as she did. No danger, no threat; the night was completely still except for the crackling of the fire beside her and the gentle snoring of Mika and Lizzie. Wiping her sleeve against her sweaty forehead she sat up and looked up at Tyreese, cradling a sleeping Judith in his arms.

"I can take over the watch if you want." She uttered, not wanting to wake the two girls as she moved over to sit by him. He handed over Judith with care, looking back into the fire. "Get some rest. We can head out tomorrow."

"I don't much feel like resting." He replied after a while.

She didn't make a reply, only looked away as she rocked Judith's sleepy gargles away.

They listened to the silence for a moment, the crickets not even stirring in the grass before Tyreese took an unsteady breath "No matter how bad things got, I used to tell myself that it could get a hell of a lot worse. Then what do you do when hell rolls up to your gates and blows it all to kingdom come?"

Carol stopped rocking Judith and looked at him with sympathy. She reached into the pocket and pulled out a small, tatty book. All the while trying not to wake Judith, she handed him a piece of flattened tissue and signalled for him to open it. "Be gentle, it's delicate."

He knew what he was looking at but the meaning was lost somewhere in Carol's mind. He placed the open tissue down in front of him, staring at the pressed flower.

"When my little girl went missing…" She started, leaving Tyreese to wonder whether any of this had a connection to the flower she carried so close to her at all. "…I used to think there were only two ways it could all end: We would find her and carry on clung so tight to her that she would never have the opportunity to be lost again, or I would spend my life waiting for her; a husk sat in a rusty old frame of a car, waiting for the day she climbed back over that railing into my arms. Live baited ready to be torn apart waiting for a girl who had died weeks, months, years before."

"It was her flower?" He questioned.

"No." Carol shook her head and smiled softly. "It's a Cherokee Rose. The story says that when the Indians were forces off their land, so many of their little ones were lost along the way. The Cherokee mothers where beside themselves with grief and anguish. So the elders said a prayer and asked for a sign to uplift the mothers' spirits, give them strength and hope. The next day this rose started to grow where the mothers' tears had fallen." Carol ran her fingers over the fragile petals. "When Sophia's trail went cold in those woods, Daryl took me down to the river where they were blooming. He told me about those mothers and their plight."

"When Sophia walked out of that barn I tried to convince myself that I was too much of a coward to end it all but I wasn't. That I wasn't worth the bullets… then I looked up to see Daryl stood in the doorway with this in hand, as heartbroken as I was and I knew I could find the strength to carry on just like those Cherokee mothers." She folded the tissue back up, pressing it between the pages of the book pages as she pushed it back into her pocket. "I used to think that this flower was for my little girl but it's more than that now; it's for them too. Lizzie and Mika, and Judith. We can't afford to be anything but strong, for them. It doesn't matter where it comes from."

Tyreese looked like hundreds of thoughts were welling up behind his lips but instead he gave her a small nod.

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Thanks for reading!


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